A train traveling from one place to another that carries passengers may include a dining car, a café car and a lounge car. Goods usually in the form of foodstuffs and drinks are sold to passengers in each of those cars.
Prior to the instant invention, before a train departs a depot or train station, a given amount of inventory in the form of foods and drinks are loaded onto the appropriate cars from the commissary at that station. The service agent is also provided with a given amount of money to make change when the passengers make purchases. To monitor or keep tab of the inventory, either sold or on hand, the service agent provides to the manager at the depot station where the trip ends a handwritten sheet that indicates the amount and types of inventory sold or on hand at the end of the trip. Data relating to the inventory sold or on hand at the end of the trip is then manually input to a workstation at the depot station, or some other place, so that it may be relayed back to a central or headquarters computer where the data may be analyzed by the management of the railroad company.
Since the goods or inventories from one train may be transferred to another train, negative inventories may be reported back to the management of the railroad company. Consider for example the following. There were five cases of soft drinks left on train 1 at the end of its trip. These five cases were to be returned to the commissary. Train 2, which happened to be at the same depot station as train 1 was short of that type of soft drinks. Upon request from the service agent at train 2, the service agent at train 1 transferred the five cases of soft drinks from train 1 to train 2. Thus, instead of the commissary at the depot station receiving the five cases of soft drinks from train 1, those five cases of soft drinks were transferred to train 2. Since the report that five cases of soft drinks were returned to the commissary most likely had not yet been forwarded to the management, the management would not have incremented those five cases when train 2 left the depot station. Yet train 2 had reported that it had been stocked with five cases of soft drinks from the same commissary, thus decrementing the inventory by five cases. The net result is that there is a negative inventory of five cases of soft drinks at the commissary located at the depot station. This lag of information results from the manual input of data and the handling of sheets of handwritten notes. Accordingly, problems, both in terms of the inventory and the pricing of the items, result. In other words, the revenues generated from the inventories being sold on the trains traversing throughout the various routes in the system may not be accurate, thereby reflecting poorly on the financial records and accounting systems of the railroad.